Right around the time activision bought out blizzard and started making awful design decisions.
Started to rear it’s ugly head in ToC.
Blizzard was acquired by Activision before Wrath launched.
That’s why during Wrath their subs peaked to around 8 million at launch and then immediately fell below half that around the time Ulduar launched; Cata and so on repeated the process with a more steady and drastic decline in overall design quality.
Retail raiding is the definition of artificial difficulty.
It’s literal trash designed by the interns they hired to replace tenured developers.
Reminder that every studio that made quality games before they were purchased by Activision was subsequently gutted, destroyed, and forced to spew out more Call of Dookie trash five times a year.
RIP:
Raven Software Studios - 1997
Blizzard Entertainment - 7/9/2008
and much
much
more
gamesradar.figurteitout/exactly-how-many-studios-has-activision-closed-generation-exactly-many/
Blizzard should just keep servers all versions of wow going - including ‘retail’ . When a new expansion comes out, Keep their ‘retail toons’ available for the next expansion and copy the characters to the ‘classic’ version.
Have seasons for every expansion - Restart the servers once the expansion is complete. At that point they could play whatever expansion they are playing over again or move on to whatever version they want to play.
Only problem I can see with this is population and Blizzard can’t handle population obviously. Maybe Microsoft will save them!
As long as the Northrend expansion comes with Microsoft Flight simulator I’m happy. (JK, Blizzard are really messing up with their communication, It’s not hard to pay some guy to keep the players in the loop relative to how big the company is)
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I’m sure the five interns living in their parking lot that are in charge of this iteration of WoW wish they were being paid in a form of currency that isn’t coffee grinds and cigarette butts.
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I enjoyed Cata more than Vanilla, TBC, & WotLK, but all 4 versions have their subjective negatives & positives. If you don’t want to play Cata Classic, then don’t. I’m sure many do, however. Most of the hysteria & bad press about Cata originates from the facerolling WotLK piñata-loot players who were shocked back to reality with harder dungeons/raids that required actual coordination to complete (the tears of which lead to eventual content nerfs), along with the controversial old-world re-vamp.
Also, no one like to take into account that late WotLK, Cata & MoP is where a lot of original players (like myself) hit franchise burnout after so many years playing WoW, & simply quit/moved-on.
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Retail begin with the end of Vanilla.
for me, the tbc-c you’ve been playing and still playing is retail, flying mounts, summon stones, teleporting portals, insane scale in power, diversity in stats, death of world pvp, cross servers bg’s, badge system, classes are gaining each other ability the game is no longer unique Rpg,
classic wow is vanilla, tbc started to mutilate wow while wrath continued that And cata butchered wow, mop was just another game so for me, anything after vanilla is Retail, and i mean vanilla of 2005 not the 2019, the 2019 version with last patch and many added features has nothing to do with the original vanilla.
whatever expansion had the great pruning and abilities like “shadowstrike” being added, I think it was “legion” that’s when I felt the entire classes were gutted and changed
I think the actual data proves you’re very wrong?
You can’t say that steadily declining subscriber numbers into crumbling subscriber numbers gives a solid rationale for them to release the expansion just to try it out?
I’m not crying for them to keep my game, I could care less. I just came back from a year break of not playing at all, it’s just a game.
But I am trying to further the enjoyment I get from the game, and by getting the opinions of other people, hopefully I’m doing my part to steer the development team towards the goal of the player. Instead of blindly publishing trash content, like cata.
I like to think of the Matrix was a standalone movie rather than a trilogy.
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You may be right here actually… I don’t know that I am a fan of the Matrix as a trilogy. Now if we’re talking Lotr… for sure.
That being said I do think classic ends with wotlk.
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Considering Blizzard refers to retail as modern, it would be fair to assume everything besides the most recent game could be considered Classic. I feel like people put too much behind the word classic. It invokes ideas and emotions subjective to individuals about what it means. To Blizzard, though, it seems to be used as more of a marketing term for their rereleases (like “reforged”). I don’t think it has any philosophical meaning or definitive game design it’s referring to.
As Classic games keep getting released, they move away from the “faithful interpretation” that vanilla was meant to be and into these Frankenstein expansions with mixed features, changes, and balance. For this reason, I think it’s important for us to redefine the word so we don’t set our expectations on what it originally meant.
Classic ends with WOTLK. Everything after that was the decline/retailization of the mmo. Legion was the only “saving” grace expansion, even that though does not warrant where the game went. They need to cap classic at WOTLK and introduce a proper SOM for WOTLK servers with seasonal updates. People will continue playing it for pvp etc.
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yeah, though I liked Legion, after MoP it was like a different game
Its not Cataclysm nor is it MOP its WoD with the Item Squish that completely changed the feels of the game since all stats were changed a lot of inbalance and problem appear from there in my opinion.
Until WoD the game wasn’t all about end game there was a lot of fun things to do while leveling at least for me, until they release WoD all monsters had their original stats pretty much and the leveling was still somewhat untouch beside obviously the change with Cata zones, gearing up in dungeons and twinking was still a fun thing to do. (Especially in MOP)
At least to me WoD is when WoW lost its “Magic” and wasn’t fun to play anymore. (Legion was good enough though.)
If they push people to Cata classic dies. We will all return to warmane private servers for WOTLK/classic enjoyment. Blizzard needs to not screw that up.
If they truly want to go along with Cata Classic they should definitely at least allow TBC and WOTLK era servers.
No, it was Legion that was the removal of PVP Gear. WoD was the expansion that was abandoned before the 1st major patch. The only content from patch 6.1 was a S.E.L.F.I.E Camera.
Well that shows how memorable that expansion was lol… the only thing I remember was I got to level cap and had literally 0 motivation to continue
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That was a lot of people. I actually took a break in most of WoD, not due to the game, but because of life.
classic ends at wod.